As biotechnology becomes more central to new innovations in healthcare, material science and manufacturing, one of the nation’s research hubs is getting a new accelerator calledPetrito launch companies focused on

Presight Capital, the international venture arm ofApeiron Investment Group, is announcing that it’s closed its first fund of $80 million. Apeiron is the family office of German entrepreneur Christian Angermayer

Facebook pushing for facials and fighting deepfakes while US Army learning AI ethics

Roundup Hello, here’s a list of all this week’s AI and machine learning related news beyond what we’ve already covered. Facebook has turned off automatic facial recognition for its users and the US Department of Defense wants to hire an ethicist to, you know, develop AI for good, of course. Let’s detect deepfakes with a…challenge!…

RoundupHello, here’s a list of all this week’s AI and machine learning related news beyond what we’vealready covered. Facebook has turned off automatic facial recognition for its users and the US Department of Defense wants to hire an ethicist to, you know, develop AI for good, of course.

Let’s detect deepfakes with a…challenge!AI engineers from industry and academia are collaborating to launch a challenge to advance technology to detect fake visual content manipulated by machine learning algorithms.

The contest, known as the Deepfake Detection Challenge (DFDC), is spearheaded by a long list of names, including: Facebook, the San Francisco based nonprofit the Partnership on AI, Microsoft, as well researchers from Cornell Tech, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Oxford, University of California, Berkeley, University of Maryland, College Park, and University at Albany-SUNY.

Deepfakes have ignited people’s deepest fears. Doctored videos of actors and actresses may seem innocuous – check out theChinese app Zao– but no one’s laughing much when it comes to world leaders orfake pornography. The fear of revenge porn or rise ofdisinformationis real.

There have been many attempts at dealing with deepfakes, such as implementing digital watermarking or coming up withmore offbeatdetection methods. It’s difficult to catch all of them, however, particularly as it becomes easier and cheaper to generate more realistic photos and videos.

So, Facebook has decided to throw $10m (or about half a day’s profit) at the problem. Researchers backing the DFDC will work together to build a dataset as well as give out grants and awards to engineers that want to participate in the challenge. They’ll have to craft a machine learning model trained on the given dataset and will be tested on how well it can detect deepfakes. A leaderboard will be set up to monitor the best submissions.

Don’t worry, none of your Facebook data will be included in the training dataset, apparently. You can read more about thathere.

You can choose to opt in to Facebook’s facial recognition feature:Since we’re still on the topic of Facebook, the social media giant announced it had turned off automatic facial recognition for people’s accounts this week.

That means that when you or your friends go on to tag people’s faces in pictures, Facebook shouldn’t automatically list people’s names if they haven’t turned on facial recognition for their account.

If you do want to keep that feature, however, then you can choose to turn it on. How to do that exactly depends on when you joined Facebook. It’s a little confusing but if you can decipher theannouncement,you’re welcome.

Miscreants nabbed cash by faking CEO’s voice:Machine learning models that can imitate someone’s voice to get them to say things they haven’t said have been around for a while. And now it looks like some criminals have used that kind of software to mimic a CEO to get an unsuspecting employee to hand over a sum of €220,000 (about £198,789 or $243,000).

The company targeted hasn’t been named,accordingto the Wall Street Journal. But the company’s insurance firm said that whoever called them pretending to be the CEO said that the request for cash was urgent and had to be transferred from the company within an hour.

The money was put into a Hungarian bank account before it was shifted to a Mexico and “distributed to other locations”. No suspects have been identified yet, but the case could be the first time that such voice-cloning technology has been used to commit financial fraud. It wasfirst reportedby the Beeb.

Hm, the DoD wants an AI ethicist?:The US Department of Defense is looking for an ethicist to help the military develop AI technology for warfare.

The Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), led by Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, was set up by the US Department of Defense to help the US adopt AI and machine learning for national security purposes. Shanahan said the organization has grown to 60 employees and had a budget of $268m this year.

“One of the positions we are going to fill will be somebody who is not just looking at technical standards, but who is an ethicist,”saidShanahan. “We are going to bring in someone who will have a deep background in ethics, and then the lawyers within the department will be looking at how we actually bake this into the Department of Defense.”

JAIC projects include using AI for humanitarian assistance for wildfires, flooding, and the controversialProject Maven, a computer vision system to analyse drone footage thatGoogle pulled out of.

US Army researchers want to build AI bots that can work together:DARPA, the US Defense research arm, is funding research projects that will test out “autonomous machine teaming”.

It wants “new approaches for autonomous teaming of physically distributed groups of AI enabled systems (multi-agent systems) when there is limited opportunity for cen